The author's views are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz.

Because several people have indicated that my High Quality Content series has been a little hard to follow, I felt it would be useful to summarize the important points I've made so far.

This series began with three types of quick, indexable, usable content. A typical business Web site can incorporate Content Optimization using Customer Testimonial pages, Staff Profile pages, and Product Review pages. These and similar unique content pages can lay the groundwork for what I call semantic content engineering.

Through Golden Pages, people often find obscure content that is relevant to suddenly popular topics. Our goal is to create as many useful potential golden pages as possible. But we want them to assist other pages, too. Those testimonials, profiles, and reviews can become golden pages, although I make no guarantees.

Semantic content engineering is a composition methodology, as opposed to a design structure or search technology. In discussing Web Semantics, I showed that we do not yet have a complete semantic markup standard to follow. Nor do the search engines yet understand the connections between our unique content and user interests. We have to engineer the semantic connections we want searchers and engines to follow.

Therefore, today's SEOs build semantic bonds between targeted keyword expressions and Web pages to create semantic visibility. That means we show the search engines expressions for which we want our pages to be considered relevant. We use title tags, bolded text, inbound link anchor text, repetition, and other attributes to do this. But we can also use off-page content (found outside link anchor text) to associate our pages with additional expressions.

To be pre-emptive, we want to brand query expressions by conditioning people to search for our keywords. We pick the query expressions, we include them in our pages, we tell everyone else to search for those expressions. When you're the only person optimizing for an expression, getting your content to the top of search results is relatively easy. This approach has been abused by unscrupulous marketers who don't compete for active search expressions. But we can often make it work by combining common sense with extra effort.

Semantic content engineering identifies desirable expressions, embeds those expressions in interlinked Web pages, and pre-emptively conditions people to use those expressions to search for specific content. We will look at co-branding and cross-branding. I'll introduce one more concept that I call Query Seeding, which is the art of telling people what to search for and why they should search for it. It really just follows basic market building or brand building principles.

And please don't be put off by "interlinked Web pages". These are natural, desirable links that every business site already puts into place. We just want to get a little more bang for our buck without utilizing controversial design techniques. I'll conclude this series later this week.

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Comments
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Sometimes it is difficult to decide weither to brand query expressions or to use semantic methods, especially when it is a new site/company and is not well known yet.
Out of habit I normally try to build semantic bonds to get the wheels rolling; but when (or should I say at what stage) does one change a site's focus to branding queries? I am sure that it is up to each one of us, but I am also sure that there are times/stages/events that may indicate when it is time.

I only brand queries when I think I've identified a topic that will take off. When you operate an entertainment mega site, as I do, it's easy to see what your audience's interests are. So when the Battlestar Galactica mini-series proved to be popular, I gambled that there would be interest in the television show. I created a BSG forum and branded for several expressions. We have generally maintained high rankings for those expressions and it is currently one of our most popular forums.
For the typical business site, the most likely sources of brandable queries will be upcoming products, events, and staff activities. Say your tweezer manufacturing company has a VP of Marketing who is active with community organizations. The company could get behind that charitable work and support it by carrying news items on its Web site.
But I'll go into some of that in the next post.

Sorry. I clicked on the links this morning and they all seem to be working. Maybe someone saw your comment and fixed them for me. I actually composed most of this entry in a text editor, rather than in the blog editor as I normally do.